Police station turns into wall of free speech

Shadi Rahimi

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, July 3, 2005

Photo: Liz Hafalia

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RAHIMI03_003_LH.JPG There is a dispute over the wall of the former Mission police station now covered with protest posters. Photographed by Liz Hafalia on 6/27/05 in San Francisco, CA Creditted to the San Francisco Chronicle/Liz Hafalia less

RAHIMI03_003_LH.JPG There is a dispute over the wall of the former Mission police station now covered with protest posters. Photographed by Liz Hafalia on 6/27/05 in San Francisco, CA Creditted to the San ... more

Photo: Liz Hafalia

Police station turns into wall of free speech

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The posters are bright, papered over each other and peeling. A public gallery of outrage and passion on a former police station that once housed drug dealers, gang members and drunks in its holding cells, the dozens of radical statements plastered on this wall at 23rd and Valencia streets make up what may be the most outspoken site in the country.

Unbeknownst to most passers-by who stop to stare, behind the poster wall lives a quiet man who furiously defends its aesthetic. With his hair slicked neatly back and black Dickies pants that match the sturdy frames of his glasses, Bruce Tomb does not look like a fighter. But for the past seven years, he has fiercely protected the 25-foot square front wall of his home, the former Mission Police Station.

Tomb, an architect, views the 1950s-style industrial building, in which he lives with his family and operates his business, as a beautiful piece of modern architecture and a valuable part of city history. Some of his neighbors disagree, seeing the boxy structure vacated by police in 1994 for a larger precinct house at 17th, six blocks down Valencia Street, as an eyesore.

But Tomb has not budged, despite numerous complaints to the city and several neighborhood meetings.

"To erase this artifact would be a disservice to the city," he says. "And for better or for worse, the wall has become a public place that is sorely lacking in this city. It allows a space for a voice that is not manufactured or controlled."

The wall wasn't Tomb's idea, but he did help it turn from a lot of hostile graffitti to a profound source of political critique.

In 1998, when tags first began appearing on his new home, Tomb gave up scrubbing them away and painted a checkerboard pattern in sky blue to "aestheticize" the scrawls. Soon, a few handmade posters had joined the blue squares and tags.

Tomb began photographing the posters in 2001. Among the first were a collection of grinning characters painted below the name "Dave," endorsements for city measures that would raise the minimum wage and beef up the Office of Citizen Complaints, and giant prints of a mock front page of The Chronicle that read "F -- the Homeless" above a picture of Mayor Willie Brown and "Save the Tourists" below it.

The first two mock newspapers were posted July 26, 2001. The next day, Tomb's photographs show, they were painted over with beige paint. The following day, three more prints had been placed higher than before. On Aug. 19, Tomb awoke to find most of his wall painted over with the same beige paint.

Infuriated, Tomb says he called the Department of Public Works: "I told them, 'You may never paint the building again, or I will sue you. This is a public art project, on my home.' "

It was never meant as a home, and although it was spruced up inside with modernist design elements, the former precinct house does not look like one now. But it fits Tomb, 46, who used to live in a converted machine shop in an alley South of Market, before winning a bid in 1997 against developers who wanted to tear down the 8,000-square-foot police precinct headquarters.

Since then, Tomb has been living there with his wife and teenage son, his brother, sister-in-law and nephew. It took one year to clean off the grime from the building's four-decade stint as the Latino neighborhood's police station.

Left behind were hollow-tip bullets, live rounds of ammunition, miles of wires and 300 lockers with sexy pinups and anti-gay stickers.

Behind the station, Tomb says, where police in the 1950s are rumored to have beaten Latino inmates, and later where gang members fought, and others used drugs, a drain was clogged with shotgun shells and syringes. Inside, jail cells with gang graffiti like Natoma X4 and XVIII Street were rank with the odor of urine.

Tomb and his brother, David, hosed down the cells until he noticed one of the floor drains capturing water and bleach was clogged. "I reached down into the slime to get the grate out," Tomb says, "and I pulled out this disgusting glob of who knows what. I looked at it, and realized that it's a plastic bag full of pot. Someone had stashed it there while incarcerated."

Since he removed the stainless-steel letters that identified the building as "Mission Police Station," Tomb says visits by locals seeking to revisit the cells where they were locked up have ceased. But critiques of the building's appearance have not.

Today, its wall remains virtually the only San Francisco site whose fading layers read of recent history -- anti-gentrification struggles, the dot-com boom and collapse, Sept. 11 and the war in Afghanistan, a hard-fought mayoral race, the war in Iraq, and the debate over Social Security reform.

Some Valencia Street residents find this graphic commentary even more unsightly than the gang graffiti it replaced. An anonymous note dated March 13, 2002, asks about the posters: "Why don't you remove them? Beautify this neighborhood, please."

There are many kinds of beauty. There is visual tidiness and harmony. But for Tomb, there is a moral beauty in a lively discussion of political issues, even though they breed a scruffy, jumbled aesthetic.

"It's cliché, the kind of polarization that often emerges in various conversations with neighbors who don't support it," he says of his wall. "I offer up that it's a kind of service for the community, for people to voice their opinions."

Although some neighbors continue to object, Tomb and his wall are in good company. They live just a half block from where 24th Street shakes itself loose of Noe Valley and takes on its other identity as the heart of the Mission District, where murals announce their presence every half-block or so between Mission and Potrero streets.

His building is in the heart of what a few years ago was a highly contested area, a hot spot for evictions, anti-gentrification protests and cultural clashes over the flood of money that, for many, was seen as washing away too much of the diversity and character of the neighborhood.

But while it would be easy to dismiss Tomb as another white professional bringing change to the area, those who object want him to make his home more bland. And while his commitment may not be to the Latino vision of the neighborhood, he says he is committed to the Mission as a place of many voices, a place where posters and murals are part of the public conversation.

Tomb complains that San Francisco lacks a sense of history that manifests itself in everyday life. When he bought the building in a public auction for more than $500,000, the city expressed hope that it would be torn down.

But Tomb says his goal was to restore it: "While I'm extremely critical of the politics of our government and the military industrial complex, one thing that is undeniable is that all the complex technology we've come to accept in our lives has come from the military. The military is a source to be co-opted and remade."

In his spacious home, patched holes remain in walls where handcuff posts once kept prostitutes separate from male inmates. The former gunroom is a hallway leading to Tomb's kitchen, formerly the lieutenant's office.

Sun filters in through a 3-inch bulletproof window weighing 1,000 pounds. Three 7-by-9-foot jail cells and a drunk tank twice their size are adjacent to Tomb's conference room. He treasures the crude tags on the walls and bars reading "Brujo" and "Boxer."

His politics have driven Tomb to fight, and win, quiet battles over his home. He threatened the state with a lawsuit in 1998 after a street marketing company hired by the state covered his wall with anti-smoking ads. He threatened to sue the city in 2001, after city workers covered the anti- Willie Brown posters with beige paint.

The layers of political issues accumulating on his wall are like newspapers stacking up or leaves falling on a forest floor, forming a rich loam of history and a record of changing times, Tomb says. He says he considers himself a gardener of sorts who "tends the conversations sprouting" on it.

Among the posters are a faded series of orange flyers that read, "Defend Social Security," a black and white hand pointing a gun toward Valencia Street, and a large beige poster of a chicken wearing an Uncle Sam top hat, gripping a gas pump. On the top half of the wall is a giant image showing a young girl marching toward a uniformed soldier on a poster that reads, "Make art not war."

The wall has become a magnet for the anonymous arts community, with labor- intensive handmade posters that appear to be comments on others, and the occasional scrawl from a passer-by in response to an opinion displayed, creating a public dialogue that slowly but visibly unfolds. Tomb is now working to create a Flash Player program to display his wall on the Internet, with cutaway windows that would reveal layers of commentary.

There are too few venues in San Francisco for artistic and political expression, Tomb says. And yes, he admits, he is a transplant to the Mission, and his home has angered some residents.

"It's human nature to not want change. As an architect, I've experienced that -- people fight it," Tomb says. "But ironically, that's what makes a city vital. If it's a jewel box, if it's a museum, it's dead."

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